61

May – November 2014
Nearly 94 years old Jerzy Bogusz, the prisoner no. 61 of the KL Auschwitz camp, he is one of the last living prisoners of the first transport to KL Auschwitz that set off on June 14, 1940 from the railway station in Tarnów to the camp in Auschwitz that was under construction.

As he himself says – until this day, I still remember the words which the commandant of the camp, Karl Fritsch, greeted us with: “You haven’t come to a sanatorium, but to a German concentration camp. There is no way out of here, other than through the chimney of the crematorium”. I became number 61 – I lost my identity in the German extermination machine – adds Jerzy Bogusz. Despite the inhumane conditions he managed to survive.

Today, the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum is the most often visited museum establishment in Poland. The number of tourists who come to see the camp is close to a million and a half per year, for some people the camp itself is a kind of attraction – a symbol and they often forget that a man brought this hell to another man.